Kaimusailing

You know it’s bad when you suspect the little heater in the cabin must be off, because it’s getting so cold so fast, and you see it is on. Little heat, big cold. They say it is the coldest day of Winter so far. The only consolation is that up North it’s single digit cold.
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The cold comes because the wind is fierce from the North, it collides with the balmy Southern airs and that causes fog and rain. The days become a cacophony of blustery shudders as the winds hit the boat, on the hard, but also whistling sounds in the rigging, some sounds of things falling over, bumps in the night. It goes on for 3 days. More rain. Stuff gets blown about the boatyard. I can watch Golf and March Madness basketball on TV. I run out of wine and water. I go to the communal shower that is unheated this year and shiver in the foggy tiled room, the hot water trickles from the mandated energy efficient shower head. The cold doesn’t help my attempt to recover from some sort of arthritis to my hip and lower back.
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I decide to go ahead and try to cook pizzas, Pizza Night, right on time. I was able to buy ingredients, and some for a future pork mole soup, and I know enough now to limit my time standing around on my feet and prep ingredients from a chair, take bike rides to loosen up my hip, and hope there is still enough propane in the cannister to bake another bunch of pizzas. I fire up the oven and begin putting together pizzas. Robert has shown up and watches as I go about my business. The first pie is a pepperoni and I add some onion to it. The second is a pepperoni mushroom with added onion. The first pie goes into the oven and I set the timer. When it goes off I have to flip the first pie around 180, the second time the timer goes off the first pie comes out of the oven to cool while the second pie goes in.
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Now it’s time to make another couple of pies. First a mushroom and onion pie, then another pie with the remainder of the pepperoni and mushroom and onion. As the pies come out, get sliced, and crowd the cutting board, the usual pizza crowd arrives and begin to consume. There are no leftovers.
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The next day I am cleaning up trays, etc., and begin making the Ole Mole Pork Soup. The usual arrangement of stock pot with colander inside gets stuffed with a bag of spinach and trimmed kale. A spice mixture of 2 cups of hot water mixed with peanut butter, honey, cumin, achiote, chili powder, and cocoa is poured over the greens and soon the pot is boiling, steaming the veggies, creating room for a pork picnic roast, trimmed of skin and fat and cut into large chunks. After 2 hours the pork is falling apart, the pot is taken off the heat, the colander is removed and sat on a plate, the pork is on the cutting board, trimmed off the bone and cut into small pieces. A jar of salsa, whoops! I accidentally purchased picante sauce which happened to be on the shelf with the salsas, so that goes into the pot after the broth had been defatted, the veggies returned as well as the diced pork.
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Robert returns with his 3 legged dog who gets the pork bone, and we sample the soup. It is good, but it would have been better with salsa, thicker, and more tastes than the picante sauce provides.
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The next day I am feeling much better, assuring me that the arthritis flare up was vaccine induced. But I am glad to have the vaccine and glad to be able to operate almost normally. It is a slow process, better is better, but still not great.
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It wasn’t easy to get back to work. I needed to consult my blog posts of long ago when I was recovering from one thing or another. Take it in stride. A fellow rolled into the boatyard who I knew well but couldn’t remember his name. I remembered what he was doing and all about him, just not his name. We spoke and he left. I went on line to my blog and hunted down the entry when I helped him anchor prior to a hurricane. His name was Lou. He had a notion that the coronavirus was weaponized. Stay away.
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Kaimu’s hulls were devoid of extraneous nautical culture, except for the areas Robert had not got to, and the bottom of the keels. There was no way I could have dealt with this, before, but now I went at it. I taped the vacuum cleaner hose to the port on the orbital sander and turned them both on. This results in almost no toxic dust from the sander. It took less than a half hour to finish the remaining flat side of the hull, then when I got down on the ground to sand off the bottom of the keel, the debris hitting me in the face caused me to stop and reconsider. I ended up using a scraper to remove the crustacean remnants.
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The bottom paint I had purchased about a year ago had sat all that time. I wisely put the cans upside down. When I opened the first one, the compacted solids that would normally sink to the bottom were now compacted against the lid. It took about an hour to break up and mix the paint.
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The next day the second can of paint received the treatment. I knew it would eventually be homogenized, but it took again about an hour. Two small cans of bottom paint booster were mixed in a bowl from the discard pile. One can of bottom paint, one can of booster, mixed in a 2 gallon bucket. The water line had been taped off, so I began rolling on bottom paint. It was a hot day and that affected the paint coverage. The paint was thickening and going on like paste. I ended up with only one thick coat of paint.
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The image, from sailboatdata.com is of a Cheoy Lee 33 ketch that is under restoration by James Baldwin, the guru of Pearson Tritons. His web site can be found by searching Atom Voyages.